Zelda Fichandler in 1982. (Photo by Tess Steinkolk)
In 1968, the regional theatre movement was finding its legs just as the Civil Rights Movement reached a major inflection point. About a month before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Zelda Fichandler, founding artistic director of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., sent a memo titled “Confidential Plan” to the board about her intentions to integrate the theatre’s acting company and audience. The memo is included in The Long Revolution: Sixty Years on the Frontlines of a New American Theater, a new book edited by Todd London, out now from TCG Books. London, a longtime arts leader, educator, and chronicler of the nonprofit theatre, spent a decade compiling this collection of essays and speeches, a project Fichandler herself began nearly 20 years ago, and was still at work on with him when she died in 2016.
Reflecting on the complementary roles of the actor and the audience, Fichandler, in a chapter titled “Beyond Black and White,” still has much to teach us about engaging and empowering diverse communities through theatre. As London summarizes in the book’s introduction, in Fichandler’s own words: “Is [theatre] doing human work? Is it bettering our society? Is it truly representative? Is it excellent?” Fichandler writes not only about integrated programming, but about the necessity of changing the way white people see, think about, and speak about Black people in society, and vice versa. She emphasizes that the artist, the text, and the audience must arrive at an equitable exchange in order for theatre to happen.
The version of her “Confidential Plan” excerpted below includes parts of the March 1968 memo, as well as a revised version published in the Sunday Star on June 30, 1968. It’s important to note that Fichandler’s initial efforts were unsuccessful from her perspective and that she reworked this plan throughout her tenure at Arena Stage. In the book’s footnotes, London writes that he decided to keep Fichandler’s usage of “Negro” and he/him as presumptive gender-neutral pronouns, both for historical accuracy and “as an unvarnished guide” to the evolution of Zelda’s thinking.
Aesthetic Power and the Moment
Where are we at Arena Stage? When we look around, inside and out, what do we see?
Arena’s record has been, all in all, a good one. A way of work has evolved over the years that, without being rigid or over-codified, seems to release the life locked behind the words of the script. A theatre structure of architectural distinction, designed to meet the needs of an existing company and make a strong statement about the collective nature of theatre, has been put up and paid for. We have, little by little, gathered around us an audience with a real, rather than opportunistic, relationship to the theatre. Our personnel tend to want to stay, because they tend to expand rather than shrivel in this environment. A company and “company style” have emerged. “Artistic standards,” sometimes excellent, never fall below a certain level and, considering the lack of subsidy, are phenomenal. Our repertory is satisfactory-to-challenging—a constant, often significant examination of the human condition via plays that speak to our own age and audience. After 18 years, three homes, and 150 productions, Arena looks and feels young. And healthy, with houses over 90 percent filled and a deficit no bigger than it should be.
When I look around, however, beyond our too-perfected technique and what [art critic] Harold Rosenberg calls the “canons of our craft,” a deep, visceral intuition tells me that the power of our art is being blunted, deadened, and caged.
Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital city, is the first city in the country to become predominantly (63 percent) Negro. Its school system is over 90 percent Negro. Yet we have no Negro actors in our permanent company, and attendance by Negro members of the community—except for plays like The Great White Hope, Blood Knot and Othello, which have Negro actors onstage—is practically nil. The Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders’ recent report concluded that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white—separate and unequal.” It warned against the development, in our major cities, of an urban “apartheid.” This is the single most pressing social phenomenon of our day and, with isolated exceptions, absent from our stage. One would think it did not exist.
The Negro’s struggle for power—economic power, business power, political, intellectual, psychological, human power—foundationally affects his relationships with other Negroes, with whites, and with himself. This struggle reverberates through contemporary American life. Each of us feels its vibrations every day. And yet we come into our theatre at night as if into an unreal world: A white audience sits around a stage upon which a white company tells “sad tales of the death of kings.” Surely we are in the wrong place! And it is not a geographical dislocation; it is a profound aesthetic dislocation. The style of our art is cut off from its source.
In Tell It Like It Is, provocative Negro columnist Chuck Stone remembers:
My minister in Hartford always told the story of a little boy who used to race the old trolley cars pulled by horses. The boy would run along for a while with the trolley car, sprint ahead, and then drop back to taunt the motorman. “What say, Mr. Motorman, can’t you go any faster?” “Yes, son, I can,” replied the motorman, “but I’ve got to stay with the car.”
We are all—all the theatres—simply staying with the car. By doing so, we deny to our work a dimension of tension, abrasion, contemporaneity, connection, immediacy, aliveness—a dimension of power.
Arena Stage proposes to leave the car and try running it alone. It proposes to enlarge its present company to include a substantial number of Negro actors. And it proposes, for a minimum of three years—or as long as the self-definition and self-determination of Black people and the relationship between Black and white people is the most pervasive circumstance of our lives—to select a repertory that makes organic—aesthetic—sense for an interracial company. In this way we can best discover and release the power within our art.
The Actor
We approached the plan by exclusion and negation—what it is not. Now we should examine it from the opposite angle and see how it adds to, deepens, and enriches the art of the theatre by means of the artist, the audience, the stage event.
The art of the theatre concerns us first. Any single Negro actor is an individual and, therefore, not like anyone else, a state he has in common with any white actor. He is also an artist with the desire to use his talent in the appropriate way: to share his human insights by demonstrating human actions on the stage. This, too, he has in common with any white actor.
But every human being is what he has been born and what he has experienced. We are each a constellation of traits of personality, mind, body, and behavior, some there in the cradle, some picked up along the way, and we are what happens to us. When two people meet, two pasts meet; we encounter one another encumbered. Surely the Negro actor, coming into power at this moment of history, knowing exclusion from the dominant white culture and therefore having a special view of it, has the capacity for a unique and particular expressiveness on the stage.
The movement of the Negro adult now taking place within American life is cataclysmic. It offers the artist, who comes to grips with our moment, catalytic opportunities for emotional confrontation and human change. If Negro playwrights can find their audience. If Negro actors have the talent and opportunity for sufficient training and experience. All the stuff of art and life is presently at hand and ready to be shared: loneliness, anger, guilt, love, paranoia, hate, derision, need, role-playing, duplicity, hope, failure, treachery, injustice, randomness, emergence, frustration, despair—the whole kit and caboodle of being alive.
The fact of Blackness is something white people simply cannot feel or know. It is like no other exclusion. “Wherever he goes, the Negro remains a Negro,” says Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, written from his experience as a Negro and psychiatrist in the Antilles. Fanon dissects the psycho-existential created in the Negro by virtue of his Blackness; by analyzing it, he seeks to destroy it. Fanon’s book describes the odyssey of a human soul from the deepest darkness into the light, the widest arc of human experience. It is an Everyman story of neurotic personality recovering into health, a journey most of us have not taken and from which we have everything to learn.
When we exclude the Negro actor from our stages and company, we not only deprive him as an artist of the opportunity to use his talents and to grow, we deprive our work of a mine of human experience that could only enrich it and shake it up. We deprive our work of tonalities and reverberations and attitudes toward white society that may be benevolent or not, that may be abrasive or not, but that are bound to be particular, deeply felt, and urgent. We deprive our work of a degree of motion, confrontation, personal exposure, contact, friction, union—of a continuously alive dialectic of change through experience—that a company of both white and Black actors could achieve, but that one of only white actors is less likely to. We deprive our work of complexity, immediacy, verticality, and learning. We deprive it of power.
The Audience
Without the audience as terminus, the art of the actor—the art of the theatre itself—does not exist. I have my own version of the old scientific riddle about whether, if no one is there to hear it, a tree that falls in the forest produces a sound: That is, when the tree falls, what is the listener (assuming he is there) called upon to do?
When a play happens, the listener, the audience, becomes a primary doer. He has an urgent and inexorable task to perform: He must answer back—not always out loud, but as good as. He has to catch the ball of action and return it to the players in a shape changed by his own reaction. Based on the rules of the game we call theatre, the audience must keep up this play of reciprocal connection for the whole evening. Because change can come about only through direct experience and not through passive watching, it is this very rule that causes change in him.
Audiences don’t just come to see our work, they are a part of it. The nature and composition of the audience has a great deal to do with the “success”—that is, the degree of aliveness, expressiveness, tension, depth, and energy—of a performance. Which is to say, the audience has a great deal to do with whether or not a performance achieves its power as an art. Actors know this by instinct and experience. “What kind of house is it?” they ask. Not the stage event alone nor the audience alone, then, but the two together in the moment-to moment life they invent and share: a spiraling excitement of discovery and gift.
Homogeneous audiences, who connect with a play in a predictably uniform way, with one pervading attitude, are anathema to the pulse of a living art. It isn’t coincidental that, in all its years of history, Arena seemed most alive while we were playing The Great White Hope and Blood Knot this year, both with interracial casts, both drawing an audience more diverse than usual with regard to race, income level, age, education, occupation, human experience, preoccupations and interests, patterns of entertainment, and expectations about theatre and life in general.
Certainly, the sight of an all-white audience in a theatre that professes engagement with life outside its walls—in an urban city with a majority Negro population—evokes Disneyland. It goes beyond the preposterous to the gut of art itself. Said Henry James: “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.” He did not have in mind, of course, the “conversation’’ between audience and performance, but he might have. The human dialogue. It is the silent but essential process for the making of a pulsating theatrical art. One can almost “hear” it going on—not only between play and audience, but also among the audience themselves. It is the real movement taking place—the movement between men’s minds.
Nothing could serve the theatrical art more profoundly than the presence of a heterogeneous, diversified, interracial audience. Our American theatres have already suffered hugely, deep within the core of their work, for the lack of it.
—Zelda Fichandler, March 1968